Little City Gardens

When you pick up a handful of  soil from a finished compost pile,  you are holding a substance called humus.  It is sweet and dark.  It holds together like spongy crumbs of cake. Humus is decomposed organic matter and it becomes the organic component of the soil.  The creation of humus requires the action of soil micro-organisms, earthworms, fungi and insects. During the process of decomposition, numerous types and generations of creatures consume and excrete organic matter, reformulating it into smaller and smaller particles.  When they have broken down the organic matter as far as they can, the digested, reformulated material, the humus, is a very small but very complex carbon structure.

Humus is a colloid, which means that it has a negatively charged surface area that can hold and release many times its weight in water and positively charged plant nutrients. The higher the humus level of the soil, the greater the capacity of the soil to support plant life.  In other words, humus is the storage and exchange site of minerals and nutrients; Plant grocery stores, food pantries, or farmers markets.  The existence and continual creation of humus essentially supports all life.

I have been thinking about humus since last night when i was flipping through my Dictionary of Word Origins and the word humble caught my eye.  It turns out that the concept of humility comes from humus,the word for earth.

Etymologically, humble means “close to the ground.” Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin humilis low, humble, from humus earth; akin to Greek chthōn earth, chamai on the ground.

I found the connection compelling.  Humility, in my opinion, is a noble quality.  It is a spirit of deference, of respect.  To be humble, as I see it, is to be guided in thought and action by the awareness of our unique and dependent position in a vast system.  It is to acknowledge one’s own creative power and the importance of one’s particular role, while also acknowledging one’s complete dependence on the power and importance of others beings, creatures and materials.

In our culture humility is not always considered a virtue.  Humility is often ascribed negative connotations from ‘lack of pride, or self assertion,’ to an ‘expression of submission.’  Similarly, in our culture, being a farmer is a relatively uncelebrated profession, ascribed a low status.  At what point in our history did humans: beings of the earth, begin to negatively connote their relationship and engagement with humus: earth and at what point did we begin to culturally, economically de-incentivize the role of the farmer?

One of the things I value most about my experience working with soil to grow food is that it encourages me to be humble, in the positive sense.   The hard work helps me to feel my own bodies relationship to the sustenance that it is coaxing.  The very fact that growing food requires continual labor reminds me that food is extremely valuable, and in turn that my body is valuable.  I enjoy the simple humility of this relationship.